


we'll go together into the sea

by meritmut



Category: Les Misérables (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Roman Gaul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 01:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during the third century AD, also known as the crisis era for the Empire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll go together into the sea

_i. The claim that the goddess is “a Celt among the Romans”…is to regard her…as pure Celticity under a Roman veneer…it is fallacious to assume that beneath a very thin veneer the Celtic gods remained uncorrupted by Rome._

Her image is everywhere, though it is not the same from one land to another. While in the south her form is that of a woman - all round cheeks and thoughtful eyes, stately on her throne with her horses at her side (and she is never parted from them; even takes her name from them) - when he rides further north with the legions he finds her there waiting for him too, though here the ways of the Empire have yet to eradicate the roots of what once was.

Here the native gods in their oldest incarnations still remain, largely, as they were centuries ago when Caesar first conquered these territories, and though sometimes she is Epona-on-the-throne, more often when the Gauls make their offerings to her it’s to the tamer of horses, the rider - and, sometimes, the Great Mare alone.

(He is a young man of Marian descent and a son of the new Rome: son of Mars and Saturn more than the She-Wolf or the golden harvest. You could find divinity in his blood if you looked hard enough - and how they loved to look, those back in Rome - but these faceless northern gods are no more than strangers to him. He doesn’t fight for gods, nor for the imperium.)

She is alive among the Aedui and they carry her name into Germania. The Gaulish auxilia keep her in their hearts there because she is of their homeland - she is a symbol of their own Patria, though she means little enough to him and it is only when the campaign takes him south once more and he finds her familiar face in shrines and stables that he begins to take comfort from the sight of her woman’s form - he begins to imagine that she might watch over the knights as she does her own children.

(Out in the provinces one may succumb to superstition, and the Seven Hills seem so very small from here. Don’t think he hasn’t heard the rumours of an Empire crumbling in on itself; don’t think he doesn’t seek out the hope of a new republic in the decades to come.)

_ii. Epona cannot be regarded as a Celtic deity or a Roman one. She is the product of the post-Roman negotiation between Roman and indigenous beliefs and iconographic traditions: she is thus a Romano-Celtic deity but not…the product of a problem-free or spontaneous synthesis. Creole deities encapsulate the limits to syncretism, and this is particularly true of Epona._

Epona is her name, Great Mare, not so different to Ceres-Demeter in her way, and it is the name that comes unbidden to his mind as he rides between garrison and vicus on dispatch and happens upon a girl, struggling with the reins of a pale horse and calling out in fluid Gaulish to the boy that perches on its back.

He stills his own mount to watch as the boy laughs, but the girl is snarling at him to hold on as best he can: the beast is out of control, bucking and pulling against the bridle and she is not strong enough to regain mastery, and he’s wondering which fool left two children alone with the animal when suddenly there is another figure in the meadow.

Lithe and long-limbed, the woman sprints across the grass on bare feet, hair a sooty banner rippling behind her as she skids to a halt at the first girl’s side and reaches out (fearless, a look of determined calm on her round-cheeked face) to rest the palm of her hand along the mare’s noise, making peculiar clicking sounds with her tongue as she draws closer.

Her other hand comes up to secure the bridle - and just like that the beast stills.

_Epona_ , he thinks. He can hear the soft murmur of her voice from here as she soothes the horse - his own whickers in response - and then she’s looking over toward him. Startled, she utters a quick command to the children (it’s a dialect of the Celts he’s not familiar with, though he can make out enough to understand she’s telling them to go home) and wraps the mare’s reins more firmly around her hand as she turns to face him, tilting her chin up proudly.

He’s an odd-looking one, the boy on the dark horse. Unmistakeably a soldier, likely a foreigner, she’s seen enough of them pass through her home in her short life to suspect he could even be from the lands south of the province they call Cisalpina. There have always been Romans around here, though. So many have taken native wives, her grandmother complains it’s too hard now to tell the southerners from the Gauls anymore.

Time was you could tell just by the gods a man kept, but even the gods have changed their faces under the onslaught of the conquering tide. He looks quite godly himself, this one - astride a great horse on the rise overlooking the meadowland, golden hair left to grow too long over the winter, a firm set to his jaw as he regards her.

She isn’t sure which god, though (none of her own, that’s for sure, there’s too much of the south in him). She likes to talk to travellers and tradesmen and even the friendlier men at the garrison, hears them pray to the one they call Mithra. Unconquered Sun, they call him, or perhaps it’s Son. Son of whom? Son of the sky and the far east, borne on the salt wind across the sea or carried across the mountains on the wings of the Imperial Eagle. They steal their gods, these Romans, and take them wherever they go.

There are more gods than there are nations, she’s only a tribesman’s daughter but she knows that already. One of them must look like him. A brave god, a boy-god, unafraid of meeting her eyes. The boys in her village are, say she has eyes like rain and they’re afraid she’ll bring the storms down on them. She laughs and calls out mockingly to Toutatis but the rains never come unless she means it.

This one isn’t afraid, though. He watches her silently and she stares right on back. She’ll show him she isn’t scared. The southerners have sunk their claws into every village for miles around, brought their ways north with them and built themselves an empire on their own militant peace, but she won’t be scared.

He holds her gaze from his horse, wondering at the disdain in her dark eyes. A frozen figure as hard-featured as any graven goddess, she glares him down and all he can think is _Epona, Epona_ -

\- she spits on the ground before her, a savage kind of grin on her face. He watches in mild amusement as she slings herself up onto the mare’s back and hares away across the meadow on the tail of the youngsters, her harsh voice ringing out to order them after her.

_iii. Given the frequency with which other Gallic goddesses enter into divine marriages with male Graeco-Roman partners, Epona’s resistance to the married state seems important. It suggests there are levels on which she operates beyond the Graeco-Roman pantheon._

_It is possible to suggest that Epona, Cernunnos, and Sucellus…are creole deities who encapsulate the limits to syncretism in Roman Gaul, and who…represent an alternative creole pantheon in Roman Gaul._

She’s there the next time he rides by, and this time she speaks.

_Where’re you from, Roman?_ she calls in stilted Latin, and he hauls on the reins to pull up beside her.

_What say you? _he calls back, unsure of her thick accent, and she grins that same stained smile as before. She’s every inch the rustic, from her dirt-caked feet to the wild tangles of her dark hair. The horse between her knees is as well-behaved as ever a steed was, patient and proud and utterly under her command.__

_Where’d you hail from?_ she asks, before he can wonder where she came by such a fine animal. He tells her the name of his homeland, not really expecting her to know it, and that grin widens.

_Thought you were. Can smell an urbanus a mile off._

He bristles at that, more at the way the derogatory tone of her voice turns the term into a slur than anything else. More and more, lately, he’s been finding himself at odds with the Imperial dogma, found himself longing for something he’d never lived to experience - Rome as a republic, when _imperium_ meant governance, not monarchy, when progress could be made against the backwards greed of the aristocracy. But Rome has let herself decay. The provinces are rising, one by one, and he has studied enough to know how goes the fate of all empires in the end.

She swings herself down from the horse and begins to walk up the slope to the fort he too had been heading towards, and he realises she must’ve been waiting for him.

_Walk with me, I’m going your way. My mother brings herbs to your surgeon and she sent me out for black mint._

The girl - and she is a girl, far younger than he’d thought when he first saw her - offers a smile it would take a far stronger man than he to refuse, so he dismounts and follows her up the hill. Along the way she talks to him in a bizarre blend of her own tongue and broken Latin, so that from the collision of the two emerges a bastardisation of both that should by rights be unintelligible, yet isn’t. This is the first time his garrison have wintered here and they’d all learned before long that the old Gaulish tongue remains prominent, just as the gods themselves (they keep Epona here in equine and feminine form both) do. Christianity has made its mark and the local bishops preach in both languages, but it’s an older world than the one he knows and this dark-eyed girl is the first creature he’s seen who manages to straddle the line effortlessly.

No, not the first. Epona comes to mind always, the goddess who follows him around the province and - he’s sure now - watches over him. He’s come to think fondly of this native spirit, and he hasn’t lost a horse in battle since he placed the crudely-carven foal on a cord around his neck.

He thinks of the girl on the grey horse when he slides the amulet between his fingers; thinks of her when he thinks of the goddess. It’s a slow winter for war and he sees her around the garrison more often now, always bringing herbs at her mother’s behest yet lingering to speak to him. She likes him, she says, likes his honest mouth and the way his hair catches the light.

She doesn’t know how to lie, it seems, though that in itself is deception she is fond of maintaining. Her people don’t know what to make of her half the time, she haunts the nemeton and one day she’ll be a priestess, if the Romans let her people live that long. (Their way of civilising you is akin to building a house over one already there, and washing away the original foundations in blood.)

But Rome is rotten, there have been too many empires risen in challenge to her - swiftly crushed, of course, but the mere fact of them speaks of cracks in the great force that swept across the world. She asks him about it, when she meets him one day: they sit together under the shadow of the wall and this time he lets her hold his knife, to compare it with her own curved sickle.

She passes her hand across it until her fingertips leave marks on the blade, and decides that since she isn’t in the business of stabbing folk, she’ll keep to her own tools and let him have his. She’s no soldier, after all.

He smiles at that, remembering how bravely she’d glared at him the first time he saw her. The women are as wild as the land up here, he’s no doubt she could be a soldier if she turned her hand to it - she snorts when he tells her this, though, and changes the subject by asking him about the empire. It’s the only thing he could talk about for hours, until sundown and beyond if she let him. And sure enough…

_Rome is the greatest power the world has ever seen, or ever will. But she is dying. We have a strange tradition of murdering those who seek to bring change - it happened with the Gracchi, with Caesar, with any who stepped out. There was a man by the name of Sabinus who sought to create a new empire. The provinces could go on without Rome, they thought. Maybe they can._

_What happened to Sabinus?_

_He was executed. Not straight away; he managed to hide for nearly a decade. Sheltered by his wife. In the end they killed them both._

_The woman too?_ she sounds faintly disgusted.

_Both. Her name was Epponina, you know. Like your goddess._

_No, she’s Epona._

_I said ‘like’, didn’t I?_

_I never can tell with you Romans._

She’s smiling despite the disgruntled tone of her voice (she complains about Rome as much as he does, finds a kindred spirit in his dissatisfaction with his superiors and he a safe listening ear), and he finds himself smiling back. When she rises to leave she passes her fingers through his fair, curly hair, and he carries the memory of that soft touch with him for hours afterward.

_iv. The depiction of Celtic gods in the western provinces was neither a simple emulation of metropolitan art, nor - at the other extreme - a visual expression of nativist opposition to Rome. Unfortunately, Romanization of form (the use of anthropomorphic imagery) has blinded us to what these icons meant to the people who fashioned and used them._

_Your gods will push ours into the sea,_ she tells him when he murmurs ‘Epona’ into her hair, fingers snarling in its endless darkness, _and so I will go with them._

_You won’t,_ he disagrees softly. He remembers the face of the goddess all across the Empire, how enduring her form is wherever he’s been. One thing her gods will not be is lost, and he tells her as much to alleviate her fears: _She lives in Rome too, did I not say? She protects our steeds as much as yours._

Because you’ve taken her, made her your own. His own goddess shifts herself to look into his eyes, bringing her hand up to place it along his jaw. Her hands are small like the rest of her, warm and tough-skinned and gentle in a way that makes up for the roughness of her voice. She never had a face like mine until the Eagle gave her one. She was Epona.

_She still is._

_She is yours now._

_I wonder if she minds,_ he ponders, and in his arms she laughs lightly. He can feel it through his chest and his throat tightens at the thought of something he cannot name - can it be the idea of losing her?

_Why would she mind? Your lot can’t pray to things without faces, I understand, but what she looks like means nothing in the end. She is your Epona, and mine, but there is a part of her you’ll never have. You’ll never have Nantosuelta or Cernunnos or Taranis, no matter how hard you fight, how much blood you spill. This will never be your Rome._

He slides his hand across her knuckles and interlocks their fingers over his leg, turning his head slightly so that his lips can brush her forehead.

_I know. It’s what I like about this land._

_Only that?_

_And you. But to me you are this land. You are Gaul, you are something I’ll never really have._

Again that low laugh, full of amusement for the innocence of her Roman boy - to have come so far, fought for so long and to know so little still…

_My little fool, Gaul is its land and its people and its gods. And the gods belong to those that love and honour them. Or fear them, I suppose. But I don’t want to be your Gaul. Or your goddess._

His hand catches in her hair and falls still. _And I don’t want to be your Roman._

_Good,_ she sighs, lifting her mouth to his, _then you can just be mine._

**Author's Note:**

> All the quotes are from a brilliant essay on Romanisation vs. Creolisation, by one of my lecturers. Worth the read.


End file.
